NASA announced on March 24 that it plans to spend $20 billion over the next seven years to develop a lunar base on the surface of the moon and will pause plans to build the Gateway space station that would have orbited the moon and served as a ferrying point for manned missions to the lunar surface. NASA administrator Jared Isaacman also announced that starting in 2027, the United States would have a near-monthly cadence of various missions to the moon.

NASA is preparing to launch the Artemis II mission as early as April, though the launch date was previously delayed due to technical issues. The Artemis II mission is a crewed lunar flyby of the moon and will be the first crewed deep-space mission since the 1972 Apollo 17 mission. NASA announced in February that it was updating its planned missions for the Artemis program, adding an additional Artemis mission in 2027 to test docking and other systems and operational capabilities in low Earth orbit in hopes of completing Artemis IV, a manned lunar landing, in 2028.